Talking to HTTP/JSON APIs with Go

Slides

Yesterday I gave a presentation at the Go User Group Hamburg called “Talking to HTTP/JSON APIs with Go”. As promised, I’ve published my slides today. Unfortunately, talks.godoc.org does not allow running Go code embedded in slides, but I’m a kind person and have released the slide sources as well. (If you’re curious, I’ve used the very simple and very cool present format.)

Takeaways

• Download JSON data via HTTP using http.Get. Read the HTTP body with ioutil.ReadAll.
• Use json.Unmarshal to decode JSON data into Go structs (with optional struct tags).
• For unit testing, start an internal web server with httptest.NewServer and provide a http.HandlerFunc that serves test data on request.
• Table-driven tests are awesome!
• Sometimes GitHub is down.

Links

• GitHub System Status API
• go-ghstatus - Go library for GitHub’s system status API
• Mentioned Go packages: http, httptest, and json
• Articles: JSON and Go and Writing Web Applications